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Here it Are
by Byron Browne |
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I
don’t know what it ever did to make us shy away but we’ve all begun
to avoid its use like a writer avoids semi-colons. It’s been with
us for a millennia and a half since the Germanic tribes brought their
yerk n’ chuk language with them from across the North Sea. Nevertheless,
we have all let it slip quietly into oblivion, denying it life’s animus
while pumping the life-infusing breath of common usage into its simpler,
easier to pronounce relative –‘s. The demi-word in question
is third person plural-the abbreviated –re, for are,
at the enclitic end of our many itemed, contracted words. By proximity,
are and were have been thrown aside as well – forgotten
in our scurry to finish a complete sentence and get back to our latte
and laptop.
I asked my stalwart Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary for some guidance
with the issue because, I thought, maybe I was wrong, again. Maybe
I had missed some new grammar point, some neologism, broadcast on
CNN. Maybe I missed the memo from Oxford. But no, page 115 of the
dictionary has the word are there (the distal adverb-there-
not the pronoun or noun, as in opposite of here.) but instead
of finding a half page entry, as I had expected, there was a single,
skeletal sentence. A fragment at that. “pres 2d sing or pres pl
of Be.” Except for the requisite etymology, e.g. [ME are, arne,
fr, OE aron, earun; akin to ON reu (they) are, erum (we) are, OE is.
More at is.] the entry was as anemic as a freshman’s essay.
And, “more at is”!? Even the dictionary, that sacred tool of
our blessed language, was not only denying the –‘re to belong to the
3d person but it was also shirking its responsibility and passing
the rhetorical buck 1082 pages to its retarded, yet somehow more popular,
cousin is.
And so and to is. The entry was almost as cryptic as the former
concerning the are. The first of a few entries read: [ME (3rd
pers. sing. pres. indic. and- northern dial. – 1st & 2nd pers. sing.
pres. indic. and – northern dial. – 1st & 2nd & 3rd pers. pl. (finally!)
pres. indic. of been – suppletive infinitive – to be). But,
is as plural for 1st, 2nd or 3rd person plural? In what alternative
universe, what northern tribe has a dialect that allows for statements
such as “we is” or “you all is” or “they is”? And if this genus exists,
if there are (is?) classrooms where is is allowed for plural,
what are, uh…is, all their English teachers doing? Are there a constant
and perennial coffee break? Maybe all the instructors are graduates
of Phoenix University. I began to suspect that these people lived
in some far off Oz, those same bleak nether-regions that are occupied
by the subjects of National Enquirer articles.
The second entry, shorter and offering \iz\ for clarity, was much
more esoteric, more existential: that which is; specif. : that
which is factual, empirical, actually the case, or spatiotemporal.
Ignoring that Mrs. Hayes at Lubbock Christian School in 1972 told
us to never use the word itself in its own definition, I felt better
after reading this. At least there was no mention of using the singular
for plural. One of the entries made sense and equilibrium returned,
my blood pressure began to fall.
Was
I over reacting? I frequently do with issues that excite and malapropisms
and solecisms certainly get my dander up (English majors are wont
to seek out strange, soft antagonists). Then, as Fortune would have
it, the voice on the radio betrayed the second-guessing. The news-the
war in Iraq, “Today, in Iraq, there’s more soldiers than before the
surge…” There is soldiers? Even from professional talking heads,
is the difficulty level of pronouncing a there’re so onerous
that it requires suspension of standard grammar regulations? Evidently
so; it is everywhere.
However, it isn’t so hard to understand. Every language evolves as
it rolls along its trajectory, changing idioms, expressions, phrases
to suit each generation’s needs and desires of expression. Languages
advance their own standards by generation, by year, by the hour. Additionally,
what language has not, over time, altered the spelling of particular
words to suit the purposeful mispronunciations that were the result
of ease of speech? The muscles in our face are forever trying for
easier methods of pronunciation. We exclude, include, interject, suspend
and insert vowels at random in an effort to smooth over those words
whose pronunciations are the phonetic equivalents of speed bumps.
We want the shorter route home. But it isn’t just this mollifying
of contractions that is the problem. We have purposefully denied ourselves
the ingestion of whole are’s and were’s (the plurals
of to be, that most served of verbs) as though, in an effort
to slim down our speech, we felt their collective weight was too meaty
to feed on. Consider this entry from a web site I was researching
for some schoolwork: Pharaoh Ptolemy XII died in March 51 BC making
the 18 year old Cleopatra and her 12 year old brother Ptolemy XIII
joint monarchs. These first three years of their reign was difficult
due to economic difficulties, famine, deficient floods of Nile and
political conflicts. “These…years…was”? I imagine even Cleopatra,
a speaker of several languages, might have proscribed asps for the
author of that paragraph.
I
asked Dr. Gary Underwood at the University of Texas
at Austin for help. I wanted
to know whether there wasn’t some terminology for this happening.
I wanted to know if anyone else had noticed the demise of these terms.
More than anything, I wanted to know if I was alone in my agony. Luckily,
I caught Dr. Underwood (a professor of English and more directly,
of Linguistics) on his way out the door-literally. Dr. Underwood retired
this past year and had I waited just another day or so, he would have
been well on his way to that realm of existence where issues of this
sort are dreamily ignored.
After trying to explain myself, Dr. Underwood offered that, "There"
is the existential, anticipatory, or dummy subject, "is" is called
the invariant singular verb, and the logical subject is called the
postponed, delayed, extra-positioned or post-positioned subject.”
He then proclaimed that this “phenomenon” has a long and healthy relationship
in the English language, even citing usage in Shakespeare as a way
to temper my ever-growing feelings of discomfort. So, simply put,
everyone’s doing it so, why don’t I just accept it and go on? [Here
the patriotic music swells.] I just can’t. My training and intuition
will not allow me to participate in what I know to be wrong. It would
be un-American. As a teacher and writer of two languages' grammar,
I am bound by an obsequious devotion to formality and regulation when
it comes to things textbook. I have noticed over the years that while
all are expecting students to know their grammar, to be familiar with
what is termed SWE (Standard Written English), no one is teaching
it any longer. My students depend on me to remain that lone voice,
the oddball eating raw honey and bugs while railing against any deviation
from the set paradigms. Each group has its own dialect but there is
and must be, a standard by which we can all exchange ideas when the
situation demands. That is, we cannot all participate in each other’s
dialects-otherwise, what’s the point? A group is a group for the sole
purpose of differentiating itself from another. So, why don’t I just
accept the solecistic machinations and fall into line? It’s unpatriotic.
Dr. Underwood used to expound on the value and necessity of “Standard
English”, in contrast to vulgar, common, colloquial English. Standard
English being the language of books, job interviews, board meetings,
contracts, sermons, lectures, articles, etc. Non-Standard English
the stuff of living rooms, cell phones, Thanksgiving dinners and late-night
arguments about why the Beatles were the better of any other musical
group. (It occurs to me now that the classroom is one of those peculiar
places where both of these entities can coexist agreeably; the lecture
delivered in SWE and the discussion following allowing for whatever
dialect is present. Well, hopefully). And so it is/are to this that
we should allow for the –re’s and were’s and are’s,
no matter the stress caused to our maximal-facial muscles. With enough
usage, they’ll beef up. So, dangle your participles like Christmas
ornaments, split your infinitives with as many adverbs as the green
line under the text will allow and end every sentence with a preposition
under. Just remember who your audience were and be sure that there
are some method to your madness.
Copyright Byron Browne
Notes
From Over Here
June 4, 2009 Column
Byron Browne can be reached at Byron.Browne@gmail.com |
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